The plot of Into the Woods is novel indeed. Steven Sondheim and James
Lapine have intertwined the stories of various familiar fairy tales with an
original story of a childless Baker and his Wife, who are the focus of the
story by attempting to reverse a curse on their family in order to have a
child. Thus creating a single even bigger fairy tale.

In the first act, the characters set out to achieve their goal of living
"Happily Ever After" through familiar routes. Cinderella goes to the
Ball and captures the heart of Prince Charming, Jack climbs the Beanstalk and
finds a land of Giants and Gold, Little Red Riding Hood survives her clash with
the wolf at Grandma's house, and Rapunzel manages to escape her tower with the
aid of a handsome prince who climbs her long hair.

The Baker and his wife must enter the woods to assemble the ingredients for
a potion required by their neighbour, the Witch, to remove a curse preventing
them from having a child. In their search, the Baker and his wife meet up with
Jack, Red Riding Hood, and the Wolf, as well as Cinderella, Rapunzel, and their
respective Princes.

These characters are all busy with their own fairy tales, but each possesses
one ingredient for the potion. . Those ingredients are: A Slipper As Pure As
Gold, which the Baker's wife gets from Cinderella, A Cow As White As Milk,
which the Baker buys from Jack in exchange for the fateful magic beans, A Cape
As Red As Blood, which the Baker gets from Little Red Riding Hood in exchange
for freeing her and Granny from the Wolf, and Hair As Yellow As Corn, which
they get from Rapunzel. The ingredients are gathered, and the spell works,
stripping the Witch of her power, but restoring her beauty. By the end of Act
One, the curse is lifted, Jack kills the giant and is rich from stolen gold,
the Wolf is killed, each damsel gets her respective Prince. At the end of Act
I, all characters seem poised to live "Happily Ever After", but do
they?

In Act Two, all the characters must deal with what happens after
"Happily Ever After". As they face a genuine threat to their
community, they realise that all actions have consequences. They are forced
into the Wood to escape the giant's wife, who has come down to earth on an
errant beanstalk to get revenge for her husband's untimely demise.

After a good deal of squabbling ensues and some characters are killed the
Baker decides it's time they take responsibility. Their realise that their
lives are inescapably interdependent, but also its that interdependence that is
their greatest strength, so the group finally bands together to dispose of the
giant's wife. Like all fairy tales, there are some overt messages in all this
that we are invited to take home with us.

Musical
Numbers

Act One

Prologue: Into the Woods - Narrator and Company

Hello, Little Girl - Wolf and Little Red Ridinghood

I Guess This Is Goodbye - Jack

Maybe They're Magic - Baker and Baker's Wife

Our Little World I Know Things Now - Little Red Ridinghood

A Very Nice Prince - Cinderella and Baker's Wife

Giants in the Sky - Jack

Agony - Cinderella's Prince and Rapunzel's Prince

It Takes Two - Baker's Wife and Baker

Stay With Me - Witch and Rapunzel

On the Steps of the Palace - Cinderella

Ever After - Narrator and Company

Act Two

Prologue: So Happy - Narrator and Company

Agony (reprise) - Cinderella's Prince and Rapunzel's Prince

Lament - Witch

Any Moment Cinderella's Prince and Baker's Wife

Moments in the Woods - Baker's Wife

Your Fault - Baker, Jack, Little Red Ridinghood, Witch, Cinderella

Last Midnight - Witch No More - Baker and Mysterious Man

No One Is Alone - Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Baker, Jack

Finale: Children Will Listen - Witch and Company

STC kills the giant - and creates a hit Into the Woods

Reviewed by Ken Healey The Sun-Herald March 28, 1993

Sydney Theatre Company, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Director Wayne Harrison

At last the Sydney Theatre Company has killed the giant! After what seemed
like weeks of having its complex set machinery stomped on by his massive,
malign foot, and the glottises of its singers pulverized by his fingers, the
STC has smeared pitch in his path and sent its songbirds to pluck out his eyes.

What songbirds they are too! The cast not only sing, they also act
convincingly. In Angus Strathie's imaginative and detailed costumes they beat
out Mr Sondheim's erudite rhythms on Ian Senczuk's formerly cursed set. The
lifting of that particular curse blows the stage floor to approximate the
double helix of the newly-opened carpark. Technology has either triumphed or
been overcome, depending on your viewpoint. If any of the above seems obscure
to readers who may have recently returned from a private space, conquering the
giant is the burden of the second act of Stephen Sondheim's magical musical,
during the first act of which characters from a clutch of our favourite fairy
tales interact with each other in an increasingly adult way.

The trouble probably starts with Jack's slaying of the Giant up the
beanstalk. His wife clomps in after interval to crush anyone under the tonnage
of her feet.

There are Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and her Prince, the Baker and his
Wife, not to mention the ugly sisters and the last-minute appearance of Snow
White and Sleeping Beauty. Wayne Harrison's production is a triumph, at
whatever mechanical, psychological and financial cost. On watching the Broadway
production on television I had the distinct impression that this show, though
brilliant in sweep, might prove to be too cerebral, too dry.

The Sydney cast exudes a certain drollness, an understated sense of fun that
stops well short of commenting on what they're doing. They are adult performers
exploring for adults a collage of kids' stories, so they knowingly share their
relish with us. It's largely a matter of their joyous attitude to Sondheim's
intricately rhyming lyrics. For the most part, James Lapine's book in
ingenious, being labyrinthine without ever becoming complicated. The Seven
Deadly Sins are exhibited in the second act, and shown as mundane activities of
ordinary people who just happen to be in ana interlocking serious of myths.

I find the show's ending, which culminates in the singing of the Lloyd
Webber-like 'No-One is Alone' to be American schmaltz, where the logic of the
fine book demands something closer to catastrophe, or if that is unsaleable,
then an impenetrable mystery.

The cast is uniformly strong, led by Philip Quast as the charmingest of
princes. He also contributes a cameo as the sexiest wolf ever to devour a
grandma. Judi Connelli is a witch of genuine power. Dean Macrae a freckled
boy-next-door of a Jack, Pippa Grandison a petite blond Cinderella with inner
strength, and Sharon Millerchip a knowing little girl inside a big red hood. In
the key roles of the Baker and his Wife, Tony Sheldon and Geraldine Turner
propel the narrative in an odd way; she is always overtly the stronger, whereas
the book points to a different dynamic. Nonetheless, they are a compellingly
watchable couple.

Brian Stacey's orchestra accompanies with miraculous feeling for the
singers' needs, from an unlikely perch high above and behind the wondrous
double-raked revolve, which give the impression that if its revolutions speeded
up, they would provide a crazy fun fair in their own right. That's what a fine
production of this musical should do - send the critic into a phantasmagoria
that spins off from the stimulating fun and insight of the show itself.

Like the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, which provide the raw material
for Into the Woods there is much in this musical that is magical and
entrancing. There is also much that is deep, dark and ominous so that it evokes
both pity and joy, laughter and tears.

Sondheim has a reputation for a being a difficult composer, a writer of
labyrinthian lyrics hitched to jerky stop-start scores.

If ever it were really true, it is certainly not true of Into the
Woods. Into the Woods is one of my all time favourite musicals. Just
as the sight of Red Riding Hood makes the Wolf's mouth water, I can savour the
lordly ring of truth in Sondheim's lyrics and find my heart skipping along to
melodies that sprout like Jack's beanstalk out of nursery rhyme tunes.

More than that I am enchanted by the mythic adventure which Sondheim and his
collaborator, James Lapine, have fashioned from the classic fairytales of
Rapunzel. Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Red Riding Hood. The paths of
all the characters involved in these tales, including the Wolf and the Witch,
plus pairs of Handsome Princes, Ugly Sisters and Giants, cross in the woods.

It is a musical about quests, the pursuit of happiness, the fulfillment of
dreams, the lifting of spells and the reversal of curses. The woods may just be
trees as Red Riding Hood asserts, but they also represent that which is feared
and must be faced. The woods are where aspiration leads, the place of
challenges and consequences, where all of the characters are brought up against
their own limitations. Some succeed, some fail. Some merely wander off, others
vanish and some are squashed flat with a sickening crunch of bones under a
giant's feet.

What is true for the characters in this musical is also true for this
production by the Sydney Theatre Company. Into the Woods is a massive
quest that sometimes must have seemed cursed with technical difficulties and
illness.

To the great credit of Wayne Harrison, his associate director and
choreographer, Tony Bartuccio, and the musical director, Brian Stacey, they
conjure up some enormously satisfying aspects to this production. First among
them is John Senczuk's set design based on the tilted twin-revolves turning one
within the other.

As these turn they create an eerily shifting landscape where nothing is
quite as it seems and anything can happen; a gloom where gnarled trees contain
coffins and striking clocks; where princes can pursue damsels to their fickle
hearts' content; and where a baker and his wife can assemble the ingredient's
to a spell that will reverse a mother's curse upon her daughter and she, in her
turn, will lift her spell on them and their family.

There are some memorable performances, beginning with Simon Chilvers
doubling as the narrator and mysteriously spellbound old man; Sharon Millerchip
as a street-wise Red Riding Hood; Philip Quast doubling as her lascivious
Wolf and Cinderella's charming but faithless Prince; and, opposite him, D. J
Foster as Rapunzel's Prince. Their renditions of Agony are a treat. Judi
Connelli is commanding in the pivotal role of the Witch, while Dean Macrae as
Jack and Pippa Grandison as Cinderella are equally authentic. Sadly, these
qualities are lacking in the musical's central characters, the Baker and his
Wife, played by Tony Sheldon and Geraldine Turner.

For a couple who are desperate to have a child, there is little chemistry
between them. Turner sings well, but without feeling. Never content to stay in
character, they can't resist playing to the crowd. She easily finds the
ruthless pragmatism of the Wife, but doesn't locate her vulnerability or
humanity when interacting with characters such as Cinderella and the Prince.
Sheldon has the vulnerability but he never develops the strength that should
become apparent in the Baker.

The dark quality of Act 2 is never quite achieved as the Happy Ever After
feeling of Act 1 teeters on the brink of chaos with the arrival of the Giant,
and people get killed or vanish under rubble.

The losses of parents and partners needs to be more keenly felt by those who
survive. Even so, I would not have missed this musical for the world.

It is so good to see it and hear it because it has the power to sweep you up
into its magical world which has so much to say to our everyday experience.

Technological problems finally surmounted

Rightfull, the Sydney Theatre Company production of Stephen Sondheims
Into ihe Woods, which made its debut at the Sydney Opera House in
mid-March, is doing a roaring trade.

Immense technological problems with the complicated revolve a small circular
area within two independant concentric rings cancelled scene previews and
forced a delay the scheduled premiere.

But by the time I saw it, on Tuesday, March 23, shortly after opening. it
was as slick a piece of stagecraft as I have encountered in many a moon, and
more than musically proficent enough, under the idiomatc and energetic baton of
Brian Stacey, to satisfy all but the most narrowly one-eyed opera devotee. In
comprison, the first airing of the piece in this country, a television version
emanating from New York, was much less satisfying.

Despite the difficulties obviously encountered in making it work in the
first place the Bennolong Point Drama Theatre is an acknowledged technological
nightmare for any large scale production due to its minimal backstage area to
which access is severely limited. John Senczuk's set design works superbly,
facilitating the sort of exemplary flow of the action from scene to scene which
is so vital to the successful staging of any musical.

The presentation of the giantess fated to be slain by Jack of beanstalk fame
is a positive master stroke, first as an enormous pair of cardboard cutout legs
and feet descending not quite to the knees from above the proscenium arch to
crush those who are required to be crushed later in the form of bloodied face
toppling onto the OP side of the stage.

Many of Angus Strathie's costumes are also exemplary and all are first rate,
especially is realisation of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf in
particular is a gem.

But these contributions to the resounding success of the STC's Into the
Woods are finally less critical than extraordinarily pleasing and well
balanced, cast assembled by the company.

Its Big Four, Geraldine Turner, Philip Quast, Judi Connelli, and Tony
Sheldon in the order they are billed on the program are of course always good
value on any stage; but as the evening progresses it rapidly becomes evident
that this production is no mere vehicle for a tiny handful of star turns.

I still can't quite get over the memorable, and memorably fresh impact of
Sharon Millerchip's Little Red Riding Hood skipping about the stage with an
ebullient energy that simply has to be the envy of anyone in the audience above
the age of 21, delivering her lines with exemplary impact, singing with a small
yet thoroughly pleasing voice as required.

The precision choreographic teamwork of D.J. Foster as Rapunzel's Prince
and Philip Quast as Cinderella's Prince is delicious, the way they bounce their
lines off each other sheer delight. In his other persona, as the Big Bad Wolf,
Quast is also a comic terror.

Melissa Jaffer gives a first rate performance as Jack's Mother, and Dean
Macrae is ingratiatingly dim as the good-natured Jack.

As the Baker and his Wife, the central couple on whom the action largely
focuses, Sheldon and Turner, on the other hand, do not come up with definitive
contributions, their characters are a little fuzzy, they don't strike as many
sparks off each other as one might have wished. Both performances are good
rather than outstanding, which is a significant loss to the overall impact of
the production.

Judi Connelli's Witch is perhaps a trifle toward the other end of the
performance spectrum somewhat overdrawn, a little to loud. I rather like my
witches like that, but some will find her a little over the top.

Everything in this production is inevitably miked, in contravention of
traditional operatic performance practice, but rejecting such run of the mill
accoutrements of the modern theatre even in certain, thankfully as yet limited
quarters of mainstream operatic performance is becoming increasingly akin to
objections of the blacksmiths union to the advert of the motor car well nigh a
century ago now.

Only very rarely, to cite a case point, does the orchestra for Into the
Woods achieve eyeball to eyeball contact with its audience or it can its
sound possibly be heard unobstructed due to its positioning at the very rare of
the stage area behind the performers. The musicians simply must be amplified in
order to achieve any kind of useful projection into the audience area.
Occasionally, individual voices are somewhat over reinforced, but generally the
sound balance of this performance is as satisfying as its visual and histrionic
aspects.

Like practically all of its predecessors in the remarkable Sondheim oeuvre,
Into the Woods is an unconventional musical. His talent seems to be
compulsively equipped with the sort of surprises that make its emanations as
irresistible as each new one is unexpectedly different from all that has come
before.

Who, for instance would have dream it possible to create a decidedly
intoxicating musical out of the scenario of Sweeney Todd before Sondheim
did it so magnificently.

Who, in the proximate case, would have credited that the device of bringing
fairytale characters to life in scrambled juxtaposition to each other would
produce workable children's theatre, let alone a viable musical containing not
only plenty of entertainment for adults but more rare and valuable of all
theatrical ingredients, provocation in thought?

Into the Woods gives us a vast repertory of characters we already
know have known since childhood, and loved and/or hated or feared for years.
But it then mixes them up on us, projecting them and us along with them into
uncharted, intellectually provocative and challenging waters.

This is more than the extension of the parameters of Shakespeare's Hamlet
involved in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, for
instance, where imagination runs riot within context of the minor characters in
a great play. In Into the Woods, we are very purposefully, and with the
utmost seriousness, led into the menacing, unknown territory of outback
fairyland.

Like the forest of Hansel and Gretel, these woods symbolise the unknown both
fanciful, friendly and not so nice, and the great achievement of Wayne
Harrison's production for the STC is that it manages to make manifest the
deeper built in meanings of the piece more effectively and clearly than did the
TV production.

In comparison it is much more full blooded obvious, if you like, but in the
best sense, clear, rather than pussyfooting around the point. It deserves every
bit of the considerable success at the box office, which brought Standing Room
Only signs almost from the word go.

Review of Into The Woods by Sydney Morning Herald
10/04/93

I've met many hard-core Sondheim fans but I am not one of their number.
However, the current production of Into the Woods in the Drama Theatre
of the Sydney Opera House may well signal my conversion. It's marvellous, and
boasts as fine a cast as could be fielded for this musical anywhere in the
world.

Geraldine Turner gets top billing and she's darned good but for my money
Judy Connelli, Philip Quast and Sharon Millerchip gallop off with the
evening's honours. All three are magnificent. I am always cautious about urging
a show on readers but in this case I have no hesitation. A contingent of
Germans, 250 passengers from the luxury cruise liner Europa, were in the
audience last Monday and despite the difficulty they must have had
comprehending Sondheim's intricate lyrics, they appeared to enjoy it every bit
as much as the locals. Whatever you do, don't miss it.

A day or so later I was telling someone how much I'd enjoyed this show and
mentioned Philip Quast. It transpired that the chap I was talking to knew the
Quasts, a famous turkey-farming family from Tamworth. Young Philip has not been
associated with a turkey (in the showbiz sense) for some time. Indeed, he's
much in demand on the London stage as well as here. In between times, Philip
likes to make an appearance on the television show that endeared him to legions
of kids, the ABC's Playschool.

We would like to thank Matt and Elizabeth for providing us with these
articles.